Ladies, tuck into that pot of yoghurt: new research presented to the American Heart Association suggests five servings per week lowers your blood pressure.

A research team from the Boston University School of Medicine analysed data collected from tens of thousands of Americans during the course of decades-long health studies.

They found that women who ate five servings of yoghurt a day had a 20 percent reduction in the risk of developing high blood pressure compared to the women who only ate yoghurt occasionally (about once a month).

The healthy goodness of yoghurt was magnified when the participants' diets mirrored the DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) — an eating plan that largely revolves around whole grains, fruits and vegetables, low salt and low-to-moderate fat intake, which doctors consistently rate the healthiest diet in the world.

"No one food is a magic bullet but adding yoghurt to an otherwise healthy diet seems to help reduce the long-term risk of high blood pressure in women," said the study's lead author Justin Buendia.

The effect doesn't appear to carry over for men, although not because yoghurt doesn't benefit fellas too — the men in the study generally ate less yoghurt than women, so there wasn't enough data to say for sure.

Buendia speculated that yoghurt's blood pressure benefits could be linked to several of its ingredients: casein-derived tripeptides and its elevated levels of calcium and potassium.

The research didn't go into which type of yoghurt the study participants ate, though Buendia added that "it would be interesting to see if popular yoghurt types, such as Greek yoghurt, had different effects than regular yoghurt".